Louisville Board Approves Plan To Decrease Busing

Louisville, Ky., school officials have approved a new
student-assignment plan that emphasizes school reform at the expense of
efforts to achieve desegregation.

The Jefferson County school board, which governs schools in
Louisville and several surrounding suburbs, last month voted 5 to 1 to
approve new policies that would drastically curtail involuntary busing
so that children could attend neighborhood schools.

The changes were necessary, argued Superintendent Donald W.
Ingwerson, because the district's current busing program interferes
with efforts to increase parental involvement and bring about other
school improvements mandated under Kentucky's landmark education-reform
law.

"When the Kentucky Education Reform Act was passed, it caused us to
rethink the way we were doing some things," Allen D. Rese, the outgoing
chairman of the Jefferson County board, said last week.

"This never was, in our minds, a question of segregation and
desegregation," Mr. Rose said. "It goes back to accountability, equity,
and parental involvement."

But civil-rights leaders complain that the district acted too
hastily on the student-assignment plan, which Mr. Ingwerson announced
on the morning of Dec. 19 and the board approved later that day.

State Senator Gerald A. Neal, who urged the district board to delay
its decision, said last week that board members seemed "hell-bent to
reach the conclusion of their design" and had eroded public trust with
their quick decision.

The new plan "has caused the demise of desegregation in Jefferson
County schools," asserted Georgia M. Powers, a former state senator who
serves as president of Quality Education for All Students, or QUEST, a
local advocacy group.

"I object to the whole process and the whole plan," Ms. Powers
said.

Incentive Plan Dropped

Jefferson County currently enrolls 93,000
students, of whom 30 percent are black.

As a result of one of the most emotionally charged desegregation
battles of the 1970's, the district for the past 15 years has used
involuntary busing to keep any elementary school from becoming less
than 23 percent or more than 43 percent black. Similar policies are in
place at the middle and high-school levels.

Last September, Mr. Ingwerson proposed allowing elementary schools
to become up to 60 percent black and integrating them voluntarily
through an unusual financial incentive program under which students
would receive $500 for each year that they agreed to be bused for
racial balance. (See Education Week, Oct. 23, 1991 .)

The quotas in that proposal, which remained the focus of public
debate throughout the fall, were opposed by civil-rights groups as
allowing too much racial isolation.

The Jefferson County Teachers Association, meanwhile, opposed the
financial-incentive program as unconstitutional and questioned where
funding for the incentives would come from.

The plan approved last month did not include the controversial
financial-incentive program. In what was seen as a compromise, the
measure also provided that no school be allowed to be less than 15
percent or more than 50 percent black.

The revised plan called for integration to take place voluntarily,
by giving parents a choice of schools and using magnet programs and
other academic offerings to entice students to schools where they are
in the racial minority. Involuntary busing would be used only if and
where voluntary programs failed.

The revised plan also called for schools to implement special
"immersion programs," such as voluntary, short-term exchange programs
bringing students to schools where they are in the racial minority, or
uniting students from different races and schools for projects outside
the classroom.

Stability, Participation Stressed

In a memo outlining the revised student-assignment plan, Mr.
Ingwerson said the changes were needed to promote stability, parental
participation, accountability, and the use of appropriate academic
programs--reforms advocated by many educators and mandated by the
state's 1990 reform law.

The frequent transfer of students under the involuntary-busing
program "prevents teachers and counselors from establishing as strong a
professional relationship as they could with each child," Mr. Ingwerson
said.

The involuntary-busing plan also has frustrated the district's
efforts to target resources where they are needed, the superintendent
said.

Mr. Ingwerson asserted that he considered public input carefully in
drafting his final recommendations.

Luvern L. Cunningham, a consultant to the district on public
opinion, said black residents favored the old student-assignment plan
more than did whites. But, he added, both groups were united in their
deep concern over "whether youngsters, black or white, would be able to
be employed when they finished high school."

Slow Formal Response

Because the revised assignment plan was approved shortly before the
holidays, civil-rights groups have been slow in mounting a formal
response.

Stephen T. Porter, a lawyer and a member of QUEST'S litigation
committee, said he and others are studying the plan to determine if it
can be challenged in court.

The changes also are being opposed by the Fair Housing Council,
while officials of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People said they would oppose the plan until they are convinced
that it will improve the education of black students.

Vol. 11, Issue 17, Page 5

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